How to Create a Layer Mask in Elements

Adobe Photoshop Elements is an incredibly powerful piece of image manipulation software, but it's missing a very powerful feature found in Photoshop called Layer Masks. Luckily, there's a built-in way we can trick Elements into thinking it has this capability. But first, let's talk a little bit more about Layer Masks in general...

What is a Layer Mask?

A Layer Mask is a method of hiding pixels. In my humble opinion, once you make a selection, you never want to actually delete those pixels. Instead, what you want to do is to mask them off. As an analogy, think of a Layer Mask as if it were the masking tape you’d place around the window trim when painting your walls.

Why should I use one?

Using the analogy of painting your home above... rather than remove the window trim completely (yikes), wouldn’t you rather protect it with masking tape so you can do whatever you want with the walls? Of course you would. The same logic applies to your images. When you want to mess with certain portions of the image, rather than delete the unwanted bits, consider masking them off instead. This way you don’t destroy your original image, and your artwork remains flexible and you can experiment with different effects and such.

Doin' it in Elements

In Photoshop, there's a Layer Mask button right in the Layers Palette. No such luck with Elements. So, what we're going to do is use the Group with Previous command instead which will hide our photo completely, then paint on a mask on another layer below it.

In this example let's to take an image and make it into a nice, soft, romantic vignette.